*BUMP* This is a very good help for finding the best trade-routes, especially early in the game. It's not entierly complete yet though.

Thanks!

Makes me feel bad for not having exel...

If you dont have excell you can download some really good alternatives to MS Office.

One such free one is at http://www.software602.com/.

Its only 16MB so if your a little patient you can even download it with dial up.

The program is called PC Suite and the spreadsheet once installed is called 602 Tab. It does not work completely with this spreadsheet probably because of the formulas, but much of the information is still available in the spreadsheet with this program. I use Star Office from Sun Microsystems at home. But unless you have broadband its too big to download and they dont offer it for free anymore. Its $60 now I think, but thats still a lot cheaper than MS Office. Look around and you can probably find something free, or cheap that will work 90% of the time with an Excel or Word file.

Wow. That already looks like a lot of work.

One thing that would be useful to calculate in excel (but I'm too lazy to do the work) would be to calculate the following two things, given any combination of commodity, origin, and destination:

1) Profit per unit (in spacebucks)
2) Return on Investment (as a percentage of purchase cost)

Profit per unit would be most useful when you're just trying to find a profitable run, and you're not constrained by available cash. ROI would be better for times when you're poor, and the cheaper commodities may be more useful.

ER

Great work mate, now if this could include a clickable map or maps for the galaxy and systems that would be Übercool....

Please make another single player story for the game too, while you are at it! Or two.

Version 0.3 is out. Now, instead of selecting specific bases to trade from/to, you pick Systems instead, and it will calculate the most profitable Trade Routes within those two systems.

Get it here

Next, I'll implement Easy Rhino's request for ROI. It's something I wanted to do anyway.

Note, not all of the sell prices are accurate yet. I don't have the knowledge to hack the game files, so I've been entering all of this info in manually. If anyone wants to help with this effort, please let me know.

Cheers!

Magus

realy great work magus1972 thank you for this it will make the game easier...

For those who have problems, because of living without Excel i´ve made a pdf version for the commodities only, hope you agree magus otherwise i will delete it from here.
this one is
sorted by systems
and this one is
sorted by bases








Edited by - Kermit on 11-03-2003 20:19:32

Feel free to modify the spreadsheet I've posted. I myself got most of data from this website, so I couldn't complain if someone copied it, even if I wanted to.

BTW, version 0.4 is now here... No more systems validated, but I've implemented Easy Rhino's request for Return On Investment.

Cheers!

Magus

Where are you getting your data for figuring out these routes? Does your calculator only look at places that actually sell the commodity in question, or does it simply look at the lowest price - regardless of whether or not they sell it.

I got pretty excited when I found this great trade route once. I found a nice expensive commodity, Optronics, I think. I was going to make tons of money on a nice short haul. When I got to the base where I wanted to pick up the commodity, however, I found out they didn't even carry it. It was only then that I noticed that, while all available bases were listed, only some of them had notes like "base sells this item."

Ether Dragon,

Check my post 3 items before yours...

As stated quite clearly there, the Commodities Sold data has not yet all been validated. If you're not happy with the spreadsheet, feel free to help out with the validation effort!

If I could get a few volunteers, and we each take a number of systems, I can update the sheet in no time at all.

Cheers!

Magus

The spreadsheet will only calculate best routes on sellable items; however as I haven't personally visited all of the bases, there's quite a lot of discrepancy there.

Magus